[ Retro Scan of the Week ] ICD Atari ST Hard Drive
January 10th, 2011 by Benj Edwards
“Refresh Your Memory. And Keep Your Cool.”
I recently ran across this ad for the ICD FA-ST Atari ST hard drive system in a 1988 issue of STart magazine that my wife’s uncle gave me. He was quite an ST fan himself back in the day, and I was the lucky recipient of his ST collection last year.
According to an ICD catalog I have, the 20 megabyte model of this HD system (the FA20ST, seen here) retailed for US $699.95 in 1988 ($1,294.60 in 2010 dollars). The highest end model( FA52ST), which included two 50 megabyte drives, sold for $1649.95 (or $3,051.68 in 2010 dollars).
Those steep prices (common for all hard disks at the time), along with the small market size of Atari 16-bit owners in the US, made drives such as these quite rare. I’ve never seen one in the wild.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you own hard drive systems for any of your vintage, non-IBM PC compatible computers? Tell us about them.
January 10th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Sadly, I’ve been looking for a hard drive for my Amiga, but I’ve yet to get one… Oh well…
On the subject of the scan, isn’t it a little shocking to see a 100 megabyte hard drive cluster going for over $3,000 in 2010 dollars, when nowadays you can spend your pocket change and get 20 times that amount?
January 10th, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Nope, I sold my old IIgs Seagate hard drive back before vintage systems seemed appealing… I do still have a Macintosh Hard Disk 20 (1985) that somebody gave me several years ago, though.
January 11th, 2011 at 5:12 am
Many people weren’t aware of the hard drives available for Commodore’s 8-bit machines, both from Commodore themselves and third-party solutions. Nowadays you can get the IDE64 interface to attach standard IDE devices to the C64.
January 11th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
No, but I did have a bolt-on Commodore CD drive for the Amiga 500/50+. Mainly used it for CD access on my A1200 using a Parnet cable. Man, was it slow.
January 12th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
I own a 4GB IDE Memory stick for my Falcon 030 nowadays. In former times I had a Megafile 30 (MB) for the 520ST. Since the mid nineties it was convinient to have SCSI on the Falcon, so since then I use Iomega Zip 100 drives. SCSI zip drives on the Falcon and Paralel ones on the PC. But since I also own some Networkcards (Hydra, etc) I could get the stuff from the net to the IDE Memory.
February 13th, 2011 at 7:45 am
Hey There,
I´d a Atari ST external Harddisk here 😉
Was with impressive 30 MB of free space. can send you a pic if interested 😉 Also I still had my old ST with 2(!) MB Ram ^^